


her breathing, warm against his mouth

by deandratb



Series: A Thousand Sweet Kisses [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Comics What Comics, F/M, only the tv series canon exists for this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: Prompted kiss fic. Years after the Hellmouth in Sunnydale closes, Faith and Oz have a chance encounter.





	her breathing, warm against his mouth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [broken_hearted_bard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/broken_hearted_bard/gifts).



> Happy first night of Hanukkah for you, my dear!! I hope you like this. <3
> 
> Prompt: **first kiss**

It would make more sense to both of them years later, when she learned what made a Slayer a Slayer. After he searched the world to discover himself. 

All Oz knew the moment they met was that Faith was different. And not just because she cracked jokes about his wolf side and seemed otherwise unbothered by it...despite her sacred calling, Faith was never afraid of him. She was never uneasy. 

She actually seemed less upset by it than he was, back then. 

Faith was different from Buffy, in a distinct way he couldn’t explain as her knowing about the supernatural or being able to hold her own against it. After all, Buffy shared the same gifts, the same heritage. 

Buffy fought it, though. She clung to normalcy. Oz considered her a friend, but after he got bit he could see it whenever the Slayer looked at him and didn’t realize he was aware of her attention. Buffy worried for Willow, and wasn’t good at covering her concern. 

Faith, when she first arrived, just didn’t care. She said so, and meant it, and it was refreshing. 

But on a deeper, more primal level, there was something there. Something Oz couldn’t name. Something he could feel but not see. 

The first time he came back to himself with Faith watching over his cage, it was something he could smell. That was when he finally began to understood: Faith was different like him. She was more than human. Not quite the same as the others. 

He didn’t notice it as much with Buffy because when she strived so hard to lock that part of herself up, it felt rude to notice it. He preferred his privacy, and granted the same to everyone else.

Faith wore her otherness proudly; it poured out of her in mannerisms and words and her choices. She was wrong, she was not meant to be among them. 

She was so much more than she seemed.

In the grand scheme of things at the time, with his love for Willow coloring his whole world a rich vibrant red, it didn’t matter. It was just something he noticed. 

Something he thought about idly, occasionally, when Faith gave him a nod in the halls in her dismissive way and he nodded back. He was pretty sure she had a thing for Buffy. He was pretty sure she was lonely. He was pretty sure she wasn’t fully human. 

He noticed a lot back then, filed it away. Faith wasn’t special.

Except when he first woke in the cage, when she was on duty. He couldn’t control himself at all, on those days. Her smirks were full of awareness when he pulled his clothes on and turned to face her. 

She never said a word to Willow, and he liked to think it was because she felt it too. 

They weren’t the same, but they were both different. And that mattered.

****

She spotted him across the pub, hovering near the back wall next to the band that was playing. His hands were in his pockets and he was slouching a little, making him stand out even more behind the couples and groups of friends. 

All she wanted was a drink, and she’d been in the neighborhood. She might’ve changed as she got older--thank God--but a hipster dive bar was still not Faith’s idea of a good time. 

Seeing Oz there was a welcome surprise, though. She tossed her hair back out of habit as she crossed through the crowd, squaring her shoulders.

The music wasn’t very good. His band had been better. She didn’t remember what they were called, all those years ago. Something freaky. He’d had a strange sense of humor. 

Oz sensed Faith long before he saw her, but it was common courtesy to let her approach without meeting her gaze expectantly. To let her take charge, if that was what she wanted. 

They hadn’t been close, even when they’d sort of been friends, but he remembered that much. Faith always wanted to take charge.

“Oz!” She had to nearly shout it over the live band. Why anyone would position themselves back here if they weren’t actually playing, she didn’t know. It meant her casual greeting sounded more enthusiastic than she meant it. 

“Faith.”

He didn’t quite smile, but it was there in his eyes. It wouldn’t occur to her until later that the last time Oz saw her, she was trying to kill them. He wasn’t around for her redemption, he’d probably heard little about it. For some reason, he looked happy to see her anyway.

They moved a few feet away from the stage, beyond the worst of the noise. Once she was able to think clearly, a question more pressing than small talk occurred to her.

“Shouldn’t you be…” Faith tried to think of a way to nonverbally indicate a werewolf shift without making a fool of herself and came up with nothing. “Isn’t it your time of the month?”

Amused, Oz lifted his wrist to show her the charms tied around it. “I’m not seventeen anymore. Turns out I can control it. Mostly.”

He tilted his head to the left a little, glancing down at her scuffed black boots. “Weren’t you in jail?”

“True story,” Faith agreed. He was gone by then; she remembered the soft-eyed girl by Willow’s side when she woke from her coma. But of course Oz had heard. Though she’d been an average student at best, she had never needed anyone to teach her how to wreak havoc. “Got out.”

“Good behavior?”

“Apocalypse.”

“Right.” His life was so different now, he didn’t think about high school much--but it was still strange to know that Sunnydale was back there, a Hellmouth trying to drag them all in. “How long have you been out?”

“Oh, god. Years. Feels like lifetimes. We all really almost bit it that last time,” she said with a shrug, her face shadowed by a history he couldn’t imagine.

Though Oz wasn’t without worry for his former friends, he didn’t want to imagine what she was thinking. Life was better when you spent it not focused on creatures that went bump in the night.

Especially since he’d found a way to stop turning into one of those creatures on nights like this.

Faith was tapping her fingers against her dark jeans, not looking at him now. He wondered if she expected to have to tell him the story, and why she would ever think he would ask. 

It had been a long time, sure, but not that long. He still preferred short sentences and comfortable silence. Faith had always been good at both.

“Drink?” He asked, eyebrows raised. 

She grinned, exhaled her relief, and led the way to the bar.

****

That was his reunion with Faith, as unexpected as the way Oz always thought his past would find him. 

_ A petite redhead, a foreign country, a sweet familiarity. He was still waiting. _

Their first kiss was less surprising, a slow build up through every one of his quiet chuckles and her quick smiles. 

Faith’s hand on his arm, casually possessive, challenging. Oz reaching out to touch her dark hair, shorter than he’d ever seen it but still untamed. 

Neither of them was young anymore, neither of them was easy or simple. 

Both of them were other, more than they seemed. 

They didn’t even make it back to her apartment, or into a cab--they barely made it to the street before Faith’s fingers were laced through his, gripping ‘til her knuckles turned white, and Oz was tugging her off the sidewalk to kiss her in a doorway. 

People who had known them as young adults would have drawn unfair comparisons.  _ Of course it would be Faith,  _ Oz could imagine Willow saying.  _ After Veruca, of course it was the rogue Slayer who was more hurricane than girl.  _

_ Of course it was Oz, _ Faith knew Buffy would think, bitterness in every word.  _ Will you ever stop stealing? _

But it wasn’t about that, and they both knew it, even if they couldn’t have explained. To each other, they didn’t have to try. He could see the differences in her: the gravity in her eyes where there once was nothing but restlessness, the scars that told stories of not just inflicting pain but accepting it.

Faith could see how the years had changed him, as well. He should be caged, she thought as his teeth nipped lightly along the curve of her neck. There was no beast there--at least not outside his control. The light in his gaze was merry and heated.

In the morning, with her tan limbs curled around him, she would ask Oz how it worked, how some charms and spells and the power of his mind could change the way the moon tugged at the wolf within. 

Over breakfast, which he cooked in her tiny galley kitchen, Oz would have Faith tell him stories--nothing of Sunnydale, not her demons, just travel tales. Anecdotes about characters and places she had met along the way.

But that night was fingernails dragging down his back and teeth marks where no one would see them under her clothes, stumbling into her apartment like they were drunk on each other instead of the Guinness. 

_ A part of him had always wondered, always felt it when she looked at him, carrying so much ferocity and passion behind eyes that pretended not to care. _

Their first kiss was a flash flood, something that had been building for years. 

_ A part of her had always wanted, always felt that itch when his wild eyes met hers and the monster in him called to her until he was himself again. _

On a summer night in Dublin, a mild-mannered guitarist stood at the back of a pub and waited to say hello to a lost cause he used to know.

One thing led to another. 

They never said goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from "St. Stephen's Cross" by Vienna Teng.


End file.
